


The Quiet Between Our Words

by mytimehaspassed



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-25
Updated: 2012-08-25
Packaged: 2017-11-12 20:56:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/495560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mytimehaspassed/pseuds/mytimehaspassed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laura had told him that she would be right back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Quiet Between Our Words

**THE QUIET BETWEEN OUR WORDS**  
TEEN WOLF  
Derek/Stiles; (mentions of) Derek/Kate; Derek/OFCs; Derek/OMCs  
 **WARNINGS** : AU; character death (not any good ones!); graphic depictions of violence and murder; some light stalking; underage sex  
 **NOTES** : Um, so this is what Teen Wolf would be like if Derek was a hunter of hunters, I guess.

Laura had told him that she would be right back. 

This was before New York, but after the fire that had trapped half of his family in the old Hale mansion, screaming and crying and choking on the thick smoke that had led Derek through the leaves and branches and prickly thorns of the woods like a black North Star. 

Laura had looked at him that day and smiled, which was rare for her, and she had been wearing lipstick, and Derek had only noticed because she had left a smudge on the rim of her coffee cup like a calling card, and he had thumbed it absently after she had put the cup down on their modest kitchen table, sliding on her jacket and ruffling his hair as she passed. She was older than him then, but maybe not old enough. 

The police told him that there was a robbery in town, down at the little café where Laura had worked, and that she had died there, on the checkered floor in her dirty apron, from a gunshot wound to her heart. The funny thing was, they had said, as he sat on the little modest couch in the living room across from the Sheriff, his shiny badge, and the grip he had on his hat, spinning it around and around in his fingers, swallowing once, swallowing twice. 

The funny thing was, he had said. She had been shot with a bullet made from silver. 

And Derek hadn’t thought it was very funny then, but after he threw up on the Sheriff’s shoes, he had started to laugh, anyway. 

***

That hunter was easy to find. 

He lived alone in an old, rotting Victorian on the other side of town. He had a dog chained up on the porch, sweating in the ragged heat, but it didn’t even growl at Derek’s approach, didn’t even lift its head. 

And Derek had slipped inside and watched the man sleep for two, three minutes, only leaning forward to press his knife to the man’s throat when the man opened his eyes, parting his lips in a scream. 

That was his first kill. 

It wasn’t his last. 

***

He finds nothing in New York but the swell of people with fast, pounding heartbeats, and the smell of dirt and food and rotting trash, and the feel of hard, unforgiving concrete underneath his feet. He rents a little apartment near the subway station and listens to his neighbors yell and fuck and watch TV and he doesn’t forget than he’s something other than human. 

Doesn’t forget that he’s an animal.

There are packs scattered around the city, and he draws circles around them on an old map of his father’s, something that hadn’t burned the day of the fire, and he’s careful not to intrude, not to overstep, because there’s no space to run here, but there’s plenty of space to hunt. 

He works in a garage somewhere close to his apartment, covers himself in grease and oil to mask the scent of Laura and the rest of his dead family, and talks only with his hands, strong and pliant on the underside of cars. He gets paid under the table and spends it on food and rent and guns, sleek and smooth and heavy in his fist.

And then he plays hunter in the moonlight. 

***

They’re easy to spot once he knows what he’s looking for. 

The stench of silver and mountain ash is hard to miss. 

***

He tracks down a waitress just outside of Queens that wears a silver bullet around her neck like a trophy. He smiles sweet at her as she pours him his third cup of coffee for the night, and he accidentally on purpose brushes a hand over hers and she blushes tomato red, high on her cheekbones, and he slips her a fake number when she gives him the check, and she bites her lip and looks back at the counter full of liquored old men, and tells him that she’ll be off in a half an hour if he wants to wait. 

He lies and says he does. 

They go to her car and fuck in the backseat, rough and hard, and he rips the bullet from her throat and she moans loud, and he presses into her and she arches up, and there’s one long moment where she stops breathing, one of her hands over her head on the roof of the car and the other one fisted in his shirt, but then she comes back down, panting hard, her mouth small and sharp on his neck. 

She reminds him of Kate. 

It’s easy to tear her apart. 

He drives what’s left of her body to the woods and scatters the pieces so it looks like an animal attack. He leaves her car with the door open, the keys in the ignition, and he scrubs what he can smell of himself off the seats. 

He watches the papers for the next few weeks, but she doesn’t even get a mention. 

***

The one after that is a boy in college. Derek fucks him, too, but only because when he opens his mouth to talk to him about class schedules or something equally as banal, the boy asks him back to his dorm and tells him that his roommate will be gone for hours. 

It’s slower this time, and the boy smells like fresh linen and coconut body wash and Derek licks a stripe up his spine, and he touches Derek’s tattoo with hesitant fingers and says that he’s seen something like that before, in one of his dad’s old books. Derek smiles softly and doesn’t say anything. 

He knows that this one is hard, because the boy’s not a hunter yet, because he didn’t grow up with the same legends that Derek did. But he also knows that one day this boy’s father will summon him to his office and teach him how to kill animals, and that it’s either Derek or this boy, and that Derek will always choose his own life. 

He crushes up the bottle of antidepressants that are sitting on the boy’s desk while the boy sleeps, and then waits for him to wake up, kissing him soft and slow and more intimately than he wanted. He feeds the pills to him in a bottle of water, and the boy smiles his thanks and goes back to sleep. 

Derek makes sure that he doesn’t wake up. 

***

The next one is tougher, older, more experienced. 

Derek corners him on a hunt and the man smiles through a bloody, broken mouth and says that he knows who he is, knows of the Hales and how they died, howling in that burning house like the dogs they were. 

Derek breaks both of his legs and watches him bleed out, slow and painful. 

***

After the first year, he stops telling himself that he’s just trying to find out who orchestrated the deaths of his entire family. 

He had Kate before she disappeared into the night with his virginity. 

He had her brother, who was probably the least cruel hunter he’s ever met, with his tiny, upstanding, Code-abiding family, with his daughter who will grow up to be stronger than him one day. He knew that there were other Argents in California, had sniffed his way across the state before he left for New York, if only because there was always something there that was never quite right, if only because he wouldn’t trust himself if he didn’t. 

But they weren’t Kate, and they weren’t whoever was controlling her, her wide smile and the way she would touch him sometimes, with nails sharper than his own claws. 

After the first year, he can’t lie to himself anymore. Killing hunters isn’t a way to find out the truth, especially when he’s as indiscriminate as he is, especially when he never tells any of them his own name. He doesn’t ask for any information, and they don’t tell, and the more bodies he accrues, the less he can justify them with something apropos, something that absolves him. 

Really, he’s only killing because it feels like he’s saving all those other packs from the same fate of his family, even if that sounds like the biggest fucking cliché he could ever tell himself. 

Really, he’s only killing because it feels like this is what he was meant to do with his life. 

***

But, really, he’s only killing because he likes it. 

***

His apartment building burns down in a mysterious fire after eighteen months. 

There are no casualties, and nothing left of his possessions, and the cops blame it on poor wiring and an overuse of the ancient heating system, but Derek knows what really happened. He could smell them through the ash and smoke from a mile away, could smell the lavender shampoo that Kate used to use, when he was smaller and more innocent, when she was older and more manipulative. 

There was someone with her, too, someone a little more distinguished. He smelled like pipe tobacco and old, handcrafted wood, and even without his supernatural eyesight, Derek could see the ring of wolfsbane circled around and around the apartment’s debris. 

They knew he wasn’t there, but they burned the building, anyway. 

He buys a bus ticket back to California under a name he had given Kate once, when she was in his bed and he was over her, his mouth making wet noises up and up and up her bare arm. She had asked him what his favorite book was, and he had told her, and she had smiled a sweet, interested smile, and it wasn’t until days later, with the taste of charred wood in his mouth, that he realized he had given her one of the identities his father had crafted. 

He doesn’t use it very often, but it’s one of his favorites, even with the memories that are tied tight around it, weighing heavy on his shoulders. 

He sits on the bus and waits. 

***

She catches up to him at a rest stop just outside of Kansas. 

Her smile is the same as he remembered it. 

***

She’s standing in the doorway of the men’s bathroom with her hip cocked out, wearing a perilously low cut shirt, and Derek raises one of his eyebrows at the flush across her chest, the faint whiff of arousal, and she shrugs. “I can’t help it if you grew up to be so hot.” 

Derek lets himself smile, but it’s hard in the space between them, dangerous. 

Kate locks the door behind her, and her scent hovers in the air for a moment, and Derek remembers being young and stupid and trusting her implicitly, his biggest mistake to date. 

“Where’s your friend?” Derek asks, and Kate doesn’t pretend to look surprised. “I figured you would want backup.” 

Kate laughs, and it sounds beautiful and cruel. “Don’t think I could handle you all by myself? I mean, it was pretty easy when you were younger.” 

“Sure,” he says. “But, then again, I was a child, and you had been trained to kill since birth.” 

“Ah,” Kate says, pulling out a long, silver knife from the back of her jeans. “Don’t forget that you were an animal.” She smiles again. “Still are, I guess.” 

Derek pushes himself off the cold tile of the wall, every muscle in his body tense with anticipation. “Oh, yeah,” he says, and his eyes turn ice blue. 

***

It’s messier than he expected.

He can’t hide her body, and he tries to scrub the walls clean, but he runs out of paper towels before all of the wet, red arcs of arterial spray are swabbed from the ceiling. Kate’s face is almost gone, and Derek breaks all of her fingers into bloody stumps, if only to buy him some time before they identify her body, before whoever was with her in New York comes looking. 

He buries his dirty clothes in the bottom of his bag and he gets back on the bus, and there’s a five, ten minute head start down a dirty, dusty old road before the screaming back at the rest stop begins. 

***

California is exactly the same as when he left it, Beacon Hills even more so. 

He finds his house untouched, broken and smelling worse than it did before, with roots snaking their way through the floorboards and mice scuttling around looking for food. There’s this mute, clean scent that permeates the woods and it doesn’t seem familiar, doesn’t seem like it could come from any one of Kate’s family, so Derek ignores it. 

He pries open the front door with nothing more than his hands, and leaves it hanging slightly ajar, moving back and forth with the wind. Nothing about this place is what he wants to remember, but it’s the only piece of property left with his name on it. 

He hollows out a space in the wet leaves and sits down on the floor. 

And then he waits. 

***

There’s an old pack just south of Beacon Hills, a pack Derek never belonged to, but a pack that took him and Laura in after the fire, nevertheless, when they were left only with a charred house and a vegetative uncle. The Alpha meets Derek in one of the little cafes that dots the highway, and, with his warm, inviting smile and his firm handshake, he orders Derek a cup of coffee and a sandwich, and lies through his perfectly white teeth about how great it is to see him. 

The Alpha has two small, young children and a pregnant wife at home, and when he speaks, it’s breathless and full of anger, coiled and tight. 

He takes measured sips from his cup and says, “I’ve heard about what you’re doing, Derek. And I don’t blame you, honestly. I can’t even begin to understand what you’ve gone through.” He waits while the waitress refills his coffee, glancing at Derek’s untouched food, and then leans in once she’s gone again. “But this isn’t right.” 

Derek doesn’t say anything, doesn’t move, and the Alpha shifts, impatient. 

“This isn’t how we want them to see us,” he says, and it’s suddenly forceful, and he accidentally knocks the table, and Derek’s coffee circles the rim, spilling over the edge. “We haven’t come this far – I haven’t raised my pack to be who they are, so you can go and fuck everything up.”

Derek raises an eyebrow. 

“There are hunters out there who abide by the Code, and we all want to keep it that way.” His eyes look old, then, older than his age, and he shakes his head and places a hand on the table between them, palm out. “I’m sorry, Derek, but the only way you can end any of this is to turn yourself over to the Argents.” 

“They’ll kill me,” Derek says, and he’s not sad or angry. He doesn’t feel anything at all. 

“Yes,” the Alpha says. “They will.”

“Sorry,” he says, and shrugs. “I’m not suicidal yet.” 

The Alpha sighs and looks down. “Watch your back,” he says. “Because from here on out, no wolves will come running when you call.” 

Derek smiles then, and says, “I’ll make sure not to call.” 

***

He visits Peter the next afternoon.

He never liked hospitals, and he really hates them now, the strong antiseptic smell and the blinding white of the walls, and Peter lying mutely on the bed in the middle of his room, half of his body burned beyond recognition. Derek doesn’t say anything, but then neither does Peter, and the only sound is the slow, methodic ticking of the clock on the wall. 

He sits on the hard-backed chair and waits for some kind of sign, but Peter only stares at the opposite wall. The clock ticks and people go back and forth outside of the doorway and nothing happens and Derek feels the stupidest he’s ever felt in a long, long time. 

“Thanks for this,” he says quietly as he gets up to leave. 

Peter doesn’t even smile. 

***

He’s leaving the hospital when he smells it, that same smell from the woods, mute and clean and utterly attractive. He follows the trail to the parking lot, where people are milling in the sunshine, with dark glasses and thin jackets and that apprehensive look everyone gets before they enter a hospital, and finds two boys standing by a Jeep, arguing. 

Derek watches them from a distance, watches the dark one tug on the other boy’s sleeve, and he can’t quite make it out yet, can’t quite decide which one smells like rain and laundry detergent and aftershave, but there’s something about the one with short hair, something about the way he moves his mouth, the way he looks constricted, unexplored. 

The short-haired one finally relents, and lets the darker one pull him inside the building, and Derek can’t help it, but he follows. 

They lead him to the room of a girl in what looks like a coma, a ginger-haired girl hooked up to so many machines that Derek loses count, and that’s where he learns that the boy’s name is Stiles, and that his friend is named Scott, and that the girl, the ginger-haired girl with delicate bones and perfectly pale skin, her name is Lydia and Stiles has had a crush on her since he first knew what a crush was. 

Stiles hesitates before Lydia’s bed, bringing his hand up like he’s about to touch her, and Derek can hear his pulse start to jump erratically, can smell the faint, stale smell of perspiration, and he gets this feeling all of sudden like he wants to touch him, wants to run his tongue down the column of his throat in one, long, smooth line, and it’s something he hasn’t felt in a while, and it’s something he hasn’t felt since Kate. 

A nurse bustles past where he stands against the wall, and enters the room then, telling the boys that visiting hours are over, but that they can come back tomorrow, if they like. Derek watches the disappointed looks shutter across their faces, watches as they start to leave, and doesn’t move when Stiles passes him, doesn’t say a word, even when Stiles looks up and gives him a brief, friendly smile. 

Derek has to stop himself from smiling back.

He is absolutely fucked. 

***

He finds an old terminal in the public library and starts looking up any Stiles he can find. 

The computer doesn’t tell him much, what with three Stiles’ living in an old fire station turned apartment building in Maine and two mentions of a Stiles dead from pneumonia and tuberculosis in Wisconsin and Louisiana, respectively, but he finally stumbles across a picture in the local paper of a promoted Sheriff Stilinski, with a beaming, gap-toothed nine-year-old next to him, the tiny newspaper print of his first name illegible. It’s a young, unblemished Stiles, but it’s certainly him, and Derek recognizes the Sheriff as the same one who came to tell him that Laura was dead, turning his hat around and around in his sullen hands, and he swallows, but doesn’t let himself think about it for too long. 

After that, it’s not too hard to find out where he lives, especially since his father is a well-known and well-respected member of the community. 

Derek stands outside Stiles’ house for a few moments, waiting for any sign of life, until a light turns on in a front-facing window, and Stiles steps out of the dark, jerking his shirt over his head. His skin is smooth underneath, pale, and Derek wants to put his fingers all over it, wants to open his mouth and just take a bite. 

He pulls in a slow, stuttered breath, and curses low, quiet. 

He almost doesn’t even make it back to the house before he slips his hand down the front of his pants, pulling vigorously, his nails scratching the soft underside of his skin. 

He doesn’t say Stiles’ name when he comes. 

He wouldn’t forgive himself if he did. 

***

This thing he has for a boy he’s never met, it’s kind of ridiculously inappropriate, kind of wildly annoying, and Derek can only remember the last time he became infatuated with someone he thought he knew pretty well, even if it was from her lips and not the stolen school transcripts and medical records that Derek had to learn how to hack to get. He can only remember the hurt that came from letting Kate give him something he thought he wanted, letting Kate pretend that she loved him. 

And he can only remember what it was like, afterwards, when Laura had found him in the hollowed out shell of their home with Kate’s scent all over him, with the marks that she had left with her teeth, her tongue. He can only remember what it felt like to die from the inside out, slowly, slowly, slowly. 

With this, though, he almost doesn’t feel like he did with Kate. 

With this, though, he feels like he’s the one who can seduce and manipulate to get what he wants, who can pretend to love, if only so he could be loved back. 

With this, though, he feels like he’s the one in control. 

***

The next hunter that tries to kill him is tall and slim, with dark stubble gracing the hollow of his cheeks. He tries to surprise Derek by hiding in the dark space of Derek’s burned down house, but apparently no one sent him the message about werewolves having super senses, because he smells him about a mile away, hears his heartbeat start to pump faster with Derek’s first step onto the porch. 

He waits a moment, lets the hunter make the first move, and with one lunge forward, has his claws on the hunter’s throat, ready to tear. 

“Fuck,” the hunter breathes, his body still, his throat stretching long underneath Derek’s palm. 

Derek smiles and says, “You come from the Argents?”

“No,” the hunter says, and his voice is shaky and high-pitched. Derek can hear the blood inside of him, rushing and rushing. 

“Another family, then?” Derek says, raising his eyebrows. 

The hunter opens his mouth to spit something hateful, but Derek’s claws dig in, drawing blood. He slices through the hunter’s neck so cleanly that the white of the bone is blinding. 

***

Stiles goes to school like a normal teenager. 

Derek finds it exhausting to watch him sit in classrooms all day pretending to listen to lectures on Kafka and the Pythagorean Theorem and the Cold War, almost as exhausting as Stiles finds it, passing notes to Scott in between the teacher’s lines of chalk, but he does, if only because it’s Stiles. 

Derek’s house is swollen and empty and there are no wolves to talk to since he started killing, and the only outlet he can think of is to watch Stiles try to hide his ADHD with half-assed, bored glances at textbooks and computer screens, and he finds that once he starts, it feels really hard to stop, watching him like he’s watching something he can’t miss, not even for a moment. 

Scott talks Stiles into skipping fifth period, and they take the Jeep and ride around for a while, a dangerous decision considering Stiles’ father is the Sheriff and Derek happens to know that he patrols the streets pretty regularly, but Derek finds it kind of endearing, Stiles’ rebellious teenage hormones combatting with his sense of moral judgment. 

He only parks at the same gas station that they do because he wants a closer look, because he doesn’t want to be away from the sound of Stiles’ voice, the scent of his shampoo for too long, because his skin starts to itch like it’s on fire. It’s not his fault that he runs into another hunter on the way inside the store, it’s not even like he planned it. 

The hunter is a woman this time, around Kate’s age, or at least around the age Kate would have been if Derek hadn’t have gutted her in a dirty bathroom, and she touches his shoulder and pins a gun between them, sharp on his spine. He has a hand on the door handle, and she whispers sweet in his ear, tells him to go inside, but to stay in front of her, to not make any sudden movements. 

He does. 

Stiles is joking with Scott in the candy aisle, and Derek watches him out of the corner of his eye, watches him laugh, his contagious smile and the way Scott rolls his eyes and shakes his head. He doesn’t notice them, and he certainly doesn’t notice the gun, and Derek wants to keep it that way, wants to keep him innocent, if oblivious, wants to keep him normal, and he’s never wanted that for anyone before in his entire life. 

The hunter pushes him to the back of the store, by the refrigerated milk and bottles of soda, and he turns around, slowly, his hands still by his side. “What’s your plan here?” he asks, his voice low. “You can’t kill me in front of these people.”

“Who says I can’t?” she says, and her gun is still between, and Derek knows that if he were to touch it, the barrel, the bullets inside, that his skin would start to burn. 

She smiles, and Derek feels his pulse slow, feels the wolf inside of him start to take over. 

“It’s not like you give a shit about any of these kids,” she says, and gestures to Stiles and Scott and the pimply-faced teenager behind the register, chewing loudly on a piece of gum. “You would tear their throats out and eat them whole if you felt like you could.”

Derek feels the anger inside of him start to bubble, feels the wolf’s claws in the pit of his belly, sharp, slicing. “I only kill hunters,” he says, and even to him it sounds like a lie. 

“Well, I only kill werewolves,” she says, and cocks her gun. It’s loud in the store, loud enough that Stiles glances his way, curious, but the aisles are blocking his view from the gun, so he only sees Derek, with his eyes turning blue, cold and cold and colder still. His mouth drops open like he’s not sure what he’s seeing, like he’s not sure what to say. 

And that’s when the gun goes off. 

***

She didn’t hit any vital organs. 

Or, at least, that’s what Stiles tells him, his bloody hands on Derek’s face in the back of Stiles’ car. Scott’s driving, and Derek can feel the panicked beating of his heart, his foot pressing and pressing the accelerator to the floor, but he only has eyes for Stiles and Stiles’ hands and the way Stiles’ mouth is trembling above him, the space between his freckles marred with blood. 

Derek is shirtless, a little cold, and he can’t feel himself healing, probably because she shot him with wolfsbane or mountain ash or something equally as deadly, and he assumes that Scott is driving towards the hospital, but he knows that that will only lead to more questions than he can answer. 

“I called the ambulance,” Stiles is saying, his hands warm on Derek. He’s shaky and his voice is high-pitched and he’s rambling, but Derek knows that that’s not quite out of character, not for Stiles. “But I thought it might be faster if we just drove you, and, you know, I had a little first aid training. When I was in second grade. But I figure they haven’t made too many advances in modern medicine, right? So everything I learned probably still stands. Like, you know, applying pressure and all that.” 

Stiles has a crumpled up shirt glued to Derek’s chest, and he takes a moment to think about how long that’s been in the back of Stiles’ Jeep, and Stiles is still talking, and if Derek doesn’t say anything right now, he’s going to pass out and end up in the hospital with a lot of curious doctors surrounding him. 

“Pull over,” he says, and his voice is gruff and low and almost incomprehensible. 

“What?” Stiles says, his mouth open and inviting. 

“Pull over,” Derek grits through his teeth, and it’s louder this time, too loud, and Scott slams on the brakes and they all lurch forward, and Stiles wraps himself around Derek, trying to cushion the impact, and Derek breathes in deeply, and he wants so badly to lean into the skin behind Stiles’ ear, the place where Stiles’ neck meets his shoulder, the flesh just below Stiles’ shirt, Stiles’ belt, but he can’t, not now, not yet. 

“What’s wrong?” Scott yells into the backseat with an anxious, worried tone, and Derek uses what’s left of his strength to climb out of the Jeep and stumble into the woods. 

Stiles, predictably, chases after him. 

“Go away,” Derek says from where he’s leaning against a tree trunk. “I’m fine.”

Stiles’ eyes widen and he has his hands out in front of him and Derek wants to lick the blood from his palms. “You are not fine,” he says, like he’s talking to a five year old. “You were shot in the fucking chest. You are going to die if we don’t get you to the hospital.” 

Derek can hear Scott pull the Jeep safely to the side of the road, can hear him cut the engine and start making his way towards them. 

“Can’t go there,” Derek says, and starts moving again, away from Stiles. 

“Why not?” Stiles yells, incredulously. “Are you a fugitive or something?”

Derek doesn’t make a sound, and from behind him, he can hear Stiles exclaim, “Oh my god, you’re an actual fugitive,” and he locks his jaw and wishes he had picked a better infatuation, one with more knowledge about the supernatural, one who wasn’t so fucking ordinary. 

“I’m not a fugitive,” Derek growls, and Stiles is still trailing after him, Scott way beyond that, calling out Stiles’ name, his feet heavy on the ground. 

“Then why can’t you go to the hospital?” Stiles is right beside him, then, and Derek leans his hand out against a tree and breathes, heavily, the wound on his chest trying to close, but ultimately failing. “I mean, I hope it’s not because you can’t afford the insurance, because you’re totally going to have to pay to detail my car, now that it has your blood all over it.”

“Fuck,” Derek says, and it hurts, and he makes a move like he might fall down, but Stiles is there, right there, slinging Derek’s arm over his shoulder. “Just take me home,” Derek says, and it sounds worse than he meant it to. 

“I,” Stiles stutters, the weight of Derek enveloping him. “I don’t know.” 

“Please,” Derek says, and he turns to look at him, and Stiles looks small and vulnerable and undeniably human. “Please, just take me home.” 

“Okay,” Stiles says, and he does. 

***

“I thought you meant like a real home,” Stiles says, stumbling up the porch steps with Derek leaning against him. “You cannot possibly live here.” 

Scott is trailing behind them, but he jumps ahead to open the door, even though it only takes a slight push, the locks having been kicked out a long time ago by delinquent teenagers or drug addicts looking for a place to score. They all pile in, and Derek never wanted Stiles to see his house, to see the mess his life had become, but this day has turned out to be just one surprise after another. 

“Isn’t this the old Hale house?” Scott asks, and he’s surprisingly calm for the situation that’s been unfolding around them, and Derek wonders, absently, why he couldn’t have picked him to obsess over. “Holy shit, you’re Derek Hale.” 

Or, never mind. 

Stiles almost drops Derek, but pulls him close again just in time, his smell tantalizing to Derek’s dulling senses, the wolf inside of him wanting to reach out and just never let go. “Put me down,” Derek says, gesturing to the mattress on the dirty floor, and Stiles lays him down gently, careful of his gaping wound. 

Stiles looks around and, apparently seeing nothing appealing, says, “Where’s your first aid kit? We can at least try to get some gauze on you before you die.” His tone is a mixture of emotions that Derek can’t decipher, and he wants to reach up and pull him down and kiss him until he can’t breathe. 

“Don’t have one,” Derek says, and Stiles makes a frustrated noise. 

“There’s one in the car,” Scott says, suddenly, and before anyone can say anything, he jogs off back to the Jeep. 

“Well,” Stiles says. “Do you at least have running water? We can try to clean the wound.” 

Derek shrugs, and immediately regrets the movement. He bites down hard on his tongue, and his mouth swells with blood. 

Stiles goes over to the sink and it turns out that the water does still run, so he fills the closest container, which turns out to be one of Derek’s old plastic coffee cups, and brings it over to him. He has the shirt he had given Derek in his hands, and he carefully dips it in the lukewarm water and presses it to the hole in Derek’s chest. Derek hisses, and Stiles recoils. 

“Sorry,” Stiles says. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Derek says, between clenched teeth. “Keep going.” 

Stiles presses the shirt back again, and Derek can already feel the bullet start to push its way out, and he doesn’t know whether he’ll make it before then, but he knows that he’ll try. Derek watches Stiles’ dirty, determined face and wishes that he had the strength to kiss him right now. 

“I never told you my name,” Stiles says, absently, and Derek blinks. “It’s Stiles. Well, actually, that’s my nickname, but not a lot of people can pronounce my first name, so I’m kind of stuck with it.”

Derek wants to say, “I know,” but he settles for a soft noise of acknowledgment. 

“My dad’s the town Sheriff, but you probably already knew that, right? A lot of people know him.” Stiles swipes the wet shirt around and around the wound, and then spreads out, cleaning the underside of Derek’s chin, the dip of his armpit. “Actually, you might have met him before, because I know he worked the arson case, oh,” he pauses, and Derek knows it’s just that thing he does where he talks until he says something stupid, but he feels like Stiles might know him more than he realized. 

“I’m sorry,” Stiles says, and if it’s for the bullet that’s inside of him or the fire that killed Derek’s entire family, Derek isn’t sure. 

Derek moves his mouth in a way that might be accepting, but before he can say anything, Scott is back, his hands around the edges of a red square box. Stiles takes it and lays it beside Derek, pulling out things he barely knows how to use until he comes across some bandages. 

“This is the best I can do, I think,” he says, and thumbs the bandage over Derek’s chest, smoothing out the creases with his fingers. 

“It’s perfect,” Derek says, and then everything goes black. 

***

He doesn’t dream.

But, then again, he never dreams. 

***

He has moments where he flirts with consciousness, for one, two, three minutes at a time, vaguely aware of Stiles’ form beside him, or somewhere near the window, constantly moving and doing that thing where he talks and talks and talks and just keeps on talking, and Derek thinks at one point that maybe he should answer, but then he realizes that Stiles is talking into the cell phone plastered to his ear and that he keeps saying, “Dad,” which is something Derek hadn’t thought about, that Stiles would have to answer to his father, and also that Stiles would actually stay. 

He starts moving more about the seventh time he wakes up, and when he opens his eyes, he realizes that it’s dark out, that there’s a flashlight next to him, shining up at the ceiling and casting a faint glow over his stupidly, sickly-looking skin, and that he’s alone. He breathes out and the pain in his chest is lessening, doesn’t hurt quite as much, and he can only attribute that to the bullet having worked its way out and the fact that most hunters aren’t equipped with the knowledge of how to use goddamn wolfsbane correctly, and for that he’s profoundly grateful. 

He shifts himself into a sitting position and peels the fresh bandage away from his skin and there’s a small, circular wound there, where the bullet went in, but it’s already closed, even though it looks angry and red and awful. The bullet must have fallen out somewhere, between bandage changes, and Derek hopes that Stiles was either too stupid to realize, or thinks that that’s just a normal way the human body repairs itself. 

“How did you do that?” 

No such luck, then. 

Stiles’ voice is quiet, and Derek curses himself for being too far gone to recognize his still form on the other side of the room, crouched by the window, his face still streaked with Derek’s blood. Derek wants to laugh it off in the most normal way possible, wants to tell Stiles to get the fuck out and never come back, but there’s something deep down inside of him that also wants to tell Stiles the truth, too. 

“I mean, I know my lack of medical knowledge is pretty apparent, but last time I checked, bullets don’t just pop out of people’s bodies. And the fact that the wound you got like a day ago has already healed is kind of weird.” Stiles is keeping a palpable distance, and part of Derek wants to just walk over there and grab him, roughly, sharply, marking his skin with more than just Derek’s old, brown blood. 

“You shouldn’t be here,” Derek says, instead, and Stiles narrows his eyes. 

“That’s a nice thing to say to the guy who saved your life.” He huffs like a teenage girl, and Derek thinks that this crush has really gone too far, because he wants to devour Stiles’ mouth with his own. 

“You don’t know what you’re dealing with, Stiles,” Derek says, and it’s not just the killing of hunters, because there’s this thing here between them that Derek realizes is the fragility of human life, and Stiles has the word victim written all over his fucking forehead. “There are things that you don’t know about.” 

“Clearly,” Stiles says, rolling his eyes. “Which is why I’m asking you to tell me.” 

“Where’s Scott?” Derek says, and shifts again, so his palms are out behind him, supporting his weight. 

Stiles lets him change the subject, but not without a pointed look. “School called his mom and told him he skipped, so now he’s grounded.”

“And what about you?” Derek asks. 

“My dad is in charge of the robbery, which I actually don’t think was a robbery anymore, and told me that he’d be working late. Good thing the surveillance cameras were busted, because otherwise I’d be grounded, too.” Stiles picks at a hole in his jeans, and Derek is struck again by how young he is. 

“And you’re still here because?”

“Dude, you almost got killed,” Stiles says, and he looks up at Derek and Derek holds his breath, counts to ten once, and then twice, and then three times. “And then now you’re suddenly okay. Not to mention, the bullet just fell out of you, and what was with that weird thing you did with your eyes at the gas station? I want to know what’s going on.” He pauses, and this look passes over his face, this look like he can handle whatever Derek wants to throw at him. “What are you?”

And Derek wants to tell him, wants to tell him everything from the fire to his sister to New York to the shoddy job of stalking that almost turned into his own murder, but from out in the woods, he can hear the faint steps of boots on the ground. He starts to growl, and Stiles visibly moves back, and Derek stands up, swiftly, ignoring the pain. 

“You have to go,” Derek says. “Now.” 

And for the first time in probably his whole life, Stiles obeys. 

***

Derek listens to them circle around the house from the woods, leaning heavily against one of the old oak trees. They’re doing a shitty job of keeping quiet, but Derek is immensely thankful, because his heart hasn’t stopped beating so ferociously since he heard Stiles’ Jeep just barely miss crossing the hunter’s path. He waits for the yelp of surprise, the sharp squeak of the Jeep’s breaks, but there’s nothing, and Derek sighs in relief. 

The hunters keep searching for a while, but they never find Derek. 

They never find Stiles, either.

***

Stiles comes back to the house the next day.

He has a fast food bag with him, and Derek can smell the meat inside, and his stomach gives a betraying rumble. Stiles hands him a cheeseburger and doesn’t say anything, and Derek doesn’t move away when he sits on the mattress beside him, his arms winding around his legs, hugging them to his chest. 

He chews and Stiles looks at him, and finally it’s too much, so he rolls his eyes and says, “You’ll never believe me. You should go back home and forget we even met.”

Derek, of course, won’t forget they ever met, but then again, he’s resigned himself to stalking Stiles for the rest of his probably very short life. His chest feels better, but there’s an ache there, still, and Derek isn’t completely sure that it has to do with the bullet wound. 

Stiles breathes, loudly, and he smells clean and soft and Derek wants to bury his face in Stiles’ neck. “I looked up a few things online. Like, the eyes thing. And the fact that the bullet that that woman shot you with was made out of silver. And before I left yesterday, you actually growled at me.”

Derek wants to ask why he’s doing this, but he’s afraid of the answer. 

“There are only a few things that you could be,” Stiles says, and he hugs himself tighter. “And I’m kind of leaning towards werewolf.” 

Derek puts down the half-eaten cheeseburger. “You believe everything the Internet tells you?”

“Oh my god,” Stiles says. “I was right.”

Derek watches the emotions roll across Stiles’ face, watches his mouth go through several transitions before landing on a smile, wide, stretching across his cheeks. 

“Can you show me?”

Derek breathes out a curse. 

***

His visits to Peter are becoming less and less about him and more and more about Stiles. 

He sits in Peter’s room and asks him what to do about the teenage boy that won’t stop following him around and asking him about werewolf hair and full moons and wolfsbane and whether or not he was bitten by somebody still living in Beacon Hills, and does he have anything to do with the animal attacks that have been happening more and more frequent lately, which Derek at least could answer with a resounding no, if only because his murder rate has only included hunters for the past few months. 

Peter’s fingers twitch at the words animal and attacks, and Derek stills, for one minute, two, and then chalks it up to his imagination. 

***

The next hunter he stumbles upon is an Argent, but not a very good one. He’s one of Kate’s twice removed cousins or something, Derek doesn’t really get the full story, especially when he tries to pick Derek up at a seedy bar on the other side of town, handing Derek a glass of something cold and wheat-colored. 

Derek figures he must not be from the side of the family with brains, because he smiles politely and makes a motion to the back bathroom and the dark door beyond that that leads to the alley outside. The hunter’s mouth opens up into a grin and leads the way, reaching out for Derek’s hand. 

Derek lets him take it. 

Oh, this will be fun. 

The hunter pushes him against the brick of the building outside and Derek lets him, and he bites and licks and sucks at Derek’s mouth, his hands working their way down Derek’s chest, past the bullet wound scar, sliding down between Derek’s skin and the denim of his jeans. Derek growls and the hunter makes a sound that’s half arousal and half something else, and Derek grips his shirt in his hands and turns them around. The hunter leans back against the wall, his hands still tucked inside of Derek’s pants, and Derek lets him touch him, lets him pull hard and fast and move his mouth over Derek’s mouth, wet and noisy. 

“You want to kill me?” The hunter asks, breathlessly, his teeth biting down on Derek’s bottom lip, hard. 

“I want to do more than that,” Derek says, and presses against him, their teeth clashing together. 

The hunter pulls his hands out of Derek’s pants and turns them around again, so Derek is against the wall. Derek unbuttons his jeans, slowly, and the hunter eyes the exposed skin with hunger, and then sinks to his knees. 

Derek places a gun to the hunter’s head and pulls the trigger right as he comes. 

***

Stiles comes by the house every day after school. 

Derek is tempted to ask what he’s told his father about the house, or about Derek, or about the robbery that turned out to not be a robbery, but he can’t bring himself to form the words. He doesn’t mention the hunters, and he definitely doesn’t mention the killings, but he does listen to Stiles talk about the animal attacks that his father has been investigating, the ones that dot the county in a strange pattern, the ones that almost habitually occur around the full moon. 

The ones that have only left one living victim so far, and Stiles doesn’t have to say the name, because Derek already knows that it’s Lydia. 

“Do you think it’s another werewolf?” Stile asks, watching Derek do chin-ups in the doorway. Derek had slipped out of his shirt a while ago, and he watches Stiles watch him, his eyes trailing over the movement of Derek’s muscles.

Derek wants to say, there’s only one other werewolf in the county and that’s my half-dead uncle, but he stops himself in time. “No,” he says, instead. “I don’t think it’s a werewolf.” 

Stiles swallows as Derek pulls himself up once, then twice, then three times, his biceps bulging. “Then do you think it’s something else? Like another creature?” He’s gripping a notebook full of printed out paper, and Derek knows that he’s been staying up all night to research the supernatural, knows this because he may or may not have followed Stiles home a few times, knows this because he may or may not have been watching him through his bedroom window. 

Derek jumps down, and rolls his shoulders back. “I don’t know,” he says. “Couldn’t it just be a real wolf or something?” 

Stiles stares at him like he’s stupid. “There are no wolves in California.” 

“Except for me, you mean,” Derek says, and quirks his mouth into a smile, just so he can bare his fangs. 

***

Stiles has a stupid idea of camping out in the woods the night before the full moon, so he could maybe find out what’s been killing all of those nice young joggers and co-eds and waitresses, what left Lydia in a coma she has yet to wake up from. He drags Scott along with him and parks up on one of the high hills, opening a bag full of soda and candy, and producing a pair of night vision goggles he had bought off of Amazon. 

Derek doesn’t kill them when he hears the sound of their heartbeats only because he recognizes the unmistakable choking roar of the Jeep’s engine. He watches them for a while, hidden behind the trees, watches them talk and laugh, Stiles’ open, inviting mouth and Scott’s calm demeanor, and pictures dragging Stiles out of the Jeep and bending him over the hood, clawing the pretty, white expanse of Stiles’ back. 

They’re a shit pair of investigators, and the Jeep is hardly the Scooby Doo van, because Derek can count on his hands the number of rustles in the bushes or soft patter of hooves and paws that they miss. He almost gives up for the night, knowing that Scott will soon have to turn back to meet his mother’s curfew, but then something weird happens. 

Stiles sees it first, when it’s only a black shape that moves in the distance. 

Scott sees it after that, when it gets a little closer, and Derek hunches down on all fours before he can even think, his hands turning into claws. He can feel himself becoming more hirsute, can feel his ears becoming more pointed, and when he opens his mouth, a growl comes out. The black shape is fast, faster than any animal Derek has ever seen, and he would be lying if he said that he wasn’t scared. 

For himself, too. 

The shape darts past the Jeep one more time and Derek can’t smell anything out of the ordinary, can’t smell anything unfamiliar, and that’s what worries him, because if this is someone he knows, something he knows, then he’s not sure he’ll be able to protect them. He runs over to the driver’s side door and yanks it open, and Stiles and Scott both make frightened, surprised noises deep within their throats, and Derek growls to get their attention. 

“You have to leave,” he says to Stiles, who has both of hands on the wheel and one foot already on the accelerator. 

“I’m sorry,” Stiles is saying, over and over again, and Derek wants to shut his mouth for him, preferably with his teeth and his tongue, but he doesn’t. 

“You have to go now, Stiles, I can’t protect you here.” 

“Okay,” Scott says, his voice high-pitched, his knee bouncing anxiously in the passenger seat. “We’re leaving now, right, Stiles? We’re going.” 

Derek nods his head once, and Stiles turns to him in awe for a moment, and he can feel him cataloguing the changes in his face, cataloguing the differences, and Stiles opens his mouth to say something, his trembling chin and the way he’s trying to hide his fear, but he can’t get whatever it is past his tongue, and Derek wants so badly to reach into the space between them and just never let him go. 

Derek says, “Now, Stiles,” and Stiles nods like he’s finally made his decision. 

And that’s when Scott gets ripped away from his seat. 

***

The passenger side of the Jeep is a big gaping hole and Derek had had to wrestle Stiles to the ground to prevent him from running after them, with the promise that he’ll find it, whatever it was, that he’ll find Scott, if only Stiles would calm down and just stay the fuck here. If only Stiles would stop screaming Scott’s name like a wounded animal. 

He makes a circle around where Stiles sits huddled against the Jeep, a circle that gets wider and wider with every tree or bush or undergrowth that’s not hiding Scott. He comes back alone an hour later and Stiles is fidgeting, pacing back and forth, and Derek has to place a strong hand on the back of his neck to get him to stop. 

“We’ll find him,” he says, and Stiles shakes his head. 

“What if we don’t?” 

Derek takes a deep breath, and he can feel Stiles unravel underneath his fingers as he starts to move them, up and down and back and forth, and he makes sure that Stiles is looking right at him, right at his human face, and says, “We’ll find him.” 

And he can’t help it, but he leans in and kisses him. 

Stiles kisses back. 

***

Derek drives the broken Jeep back to his house and leads Stiles inside, his fingers sharp and rough on Stiles’ skin. Stiles pushes him against the front door, his mouth on Derek’s mouth, and Derek has a brief moment of clarity, where he realizes that they really shouldn’t be doing this, that, really, if he were to think about it, he manipulated Stiles into this whole thing, but then Stiles strips off his shirt and Derek swallows down every objection. 

They stumble inside and fall to the mattress, with Derek tearing off his clothes faster than he would have thought possible, and Stiles uncharacteristically not making a sound, and Derek licks and bites and moans into the space between Stiles’ chin and shoulder, and they’re not slow and they’re definitely not soft, and Derek leaves marks on Stiles’ skin that are already starting to bruise, and Stiles scratches his nails down Derek’s chest, and nothing about this is beautiful or sweet. 

Stiles slips out of his jeans and Derek makes another guttural moan that is almost embarrassingly loud, and Stiles pulls him in and won’t let him go, and Derek somehow manages to slide out of his pants, and when Stiles lets him flip him over, his back is freckled and perfect, and Derek pushes inside. 

Stiles bites his lip so hard that it starts to bleed, and Derek presses his forehead to the back of Stiles’ neck, and he’s careful not to let his claws slide out, and he’s careful not to let the wolf take over, and he thrusts and thrusts and Stiles opens his mouth and whispers Derek’s name, and it’s unexpected and a little startling, considering that Derek has been dreaming about this moment for months, with Stiles right here on Derek’s dirty mattress, his hands stretched palm down on the floor. 

He leaves wet, red kisses down Stiles’ back, and when he comes, Stiles arches back into his touch. 

***

Stiles is gone the next morning. 

Derek finds an ancient payphone about a half a mile from his house and calls Stiles’ cell phone six times, but he never picks up. 

***

The Sheriff puts out an AMBER Alert after the holes in Stiles’ story start to grow wildlife, and Melissa McCall hovers anxiously around town, organizing searches, handing out flyers with Scott’s face on them, a picture that must have been taken last summer, because he’s smiling goofily in the sunlight for some invisible camera, sand dotting the curve of his cheekbone. 

Derek watches Stiles take too much of his Adderall and sit in his bedroom like a ghost, and he wants to go there, climb his way up the side of Stiles’ house to the window and sneak inside and press him close to his chest, speaking only with his fingers and palms and the soft way he would kiss him, but Stiles had left him alone in his charred house and never returned, and that was a big enough sign for Derek. 

Even he’s not that oblivious.

He circles the woods one more time, and then two more times, sniffing his way around where the Jeep had been parked, and there’s something there still, something he can’t quite pick out, something that seems so familiar, and he takes the vaguest part of that scent and follows it. He loses it a few times, picks it back up, and it takes him past his own house and towards the center of town, and he walks through the streets past all of the scared citizens and row upon row of Scott’s smiling face and he wants to end all of this now, go back to Stiles’ house and shake him and tell him to move on, like he has, like he always will, but then the scent stops. 

Right in the parking lot of the hospital. 

***

He goes to Peter’s room first on the off chance that he must have missed something, that somehow Peter could have fooled him all of these years, lying dormant in a bed with a scarred and vegetative body, and his heart beats strangely loud in his ears, and he holds his breath as he pushes the door open. 

Nothing seems out of the ordinary. 

Peter is still lying there, his body still burned, his eyes still closed. 

Derek doesn’t know what he was expecting, but he’s kind of glad that it didn’t happen. He goes to Peter’s side and places a hand on Peter’s hand, and it’s cold and still, and he breathes in and out and doesn’t know what else to do. 

Nothing about this has made sense so far, nothing about this has seemed right. 

He leaves the room and starts walking down the hall again towards the elevator, and he accidentally gets out on the wrong floor because there’s some sort of alert that goes over the PA system that sends the staff in the car with him into a frenzy, some sort of code that means nothing to him, and he watches nurses in scrubs rush past him, moving towards a room at the end of the hall, and it’s loud in his ears, the voices speaking over one another as he passes, their utter shock and confusion over an empty bed and flashing, beeping machines. 

Derek turns around to leave, and then abruptly stops. The chattering of the nurses keeps rising, higher and higher and then utterly roaring in his ears, and it’s awful and it’s deafening, and Derek finally realizes whose room that had been. 

Lydia’s room.

***

He steals a cellphone from one of the neglected purses in the nurse’s station and calls Stiles. 

He picks up on the fourth ring with a muted, “Hello?” and Derek thinks that he must be still in bed, must be still tired from the anxiety that coursed through him like a drug, from the Adderall he had overdosed on, and he closes his eyes and breathes out, slowly. 

“Stiles,” he says, and Stiles makes this choked noise over the phone, but Derek doesn’t let him get the words out. “It’s Lydia.” 

Stiles’ voice is nothing short of confusion. “What?”

“That thing that took Scott, it’s Lydia, Stiles,” Derek says, and he moves towards a little alcove in the hallway. “She’s not at the hospital; they don’t know where she’s gone. I could smell the mud and dirt in her room.”

“But,” Stiles says, and Derek knows he’s weighing the thought of Lydia and her beautiful smile and sweet perfume with the memory of that thing from the night before, fast and dark. 

“It’s her,” Derek says. “And I’m going to need you to help me.”

“With what?” Stiles whispers, and his voice is small and fragile, and goddammit Derek keeps forgetting how young he is. 

“With killing her.”

And Stiles starts to cry. 

***

Derek has Stiles meet him at Derek’s house, and Stiles seems hesitant when he steps over the threshold, seems weary and afraid, and he greets Derek, but pointedly looks at everything else, everywhere else, but the dirty mattress on the floor. He’s clutching a baseball bat in his hands and Derek doesn’t want to tell him that it’s stupid and completely worthless, so he doesn’t say anything at all. 

“Where do you think she is?” Stiles croaks, and if his voice is ragged from the tears or from the Adderall, Derek doesn’t know. 

“I’m not sure,” Derek says. “But I’ve picked up her scent before, so I should be able to do it again.”

“That’s, like, a thing you do?” Stiles says and then shakes his head. “Never mind, dumb question.”

Derek gestures for him to follow, and he does, and they set out into the woods, Derek crouching down low to the ground every so often, bringing clumps of dirt to his nose. He finds her scent a little ways down the road and he trails after it, Stiles close behind. 

“What do you think made her this way?” Stiles asks, and his hand reaches out to touch Derek’s back, soft, small, and Derek tries to ignore the throbbing desire that warms the pit of his stomach. 

“I don’t know,” Derek says, shrugging. 

“You’re sort of a shoot first kind of guy, aren’t you?” Stiles smiles, but it’s brief, and only on one corner of his mouth. 

“You have no idea,” Derek says. He stops at a hollow underneath the roots of an old tree and breathes in deeply, closing his eyes. There it is. “She’s close.” 

Stiles stands at attention and looks around him, but the light is fading fast and the woods are full of shadows. He keeps his hand on Derek’s back, brandishing the stupid bat with the other one, and Derek wants to turn around and pull him close, but this is neither the time nor the place, and he’s also not even close to understanding how Stiles thinks he feels. 

“I need you to stay behind me, Stiles,” Derek says, and stands up. “We don’t know what she’s capable of.”

“We don’t even know what she is,” Stiles mutters, but Derek moves his mouth in disagreement because he’s starting to get the picture that something isn’t right, from her scent and the tracks that lay deep in the ground, and the fact that everything’s adding up to something entirely beyond his comprehension is pretty disconcerting. 

“I’m not what you think,” a voice says, and Derek turns and hunches in front of Stiles, his nails turning into claws, a deep growl rising from his throat. 

It’s Lydia there, and she’s naked and pale underneath her blue hospital gown, but most definitely human, and Derek can feel the warm flush race through Stiles’ body and he’s almost hurt, almost jealous, before he realizes that Lydia is entirely not what he thought, her arms wrapped around herself in some attempt to cover up her immodesty, her hair tangled and dirty, her eyes wide and frightened. 

“I’m not the one who killed those people,” she says, and Stiles makes a move to go to her, but Derek places a strong hand on his wrist, holding him still. “I’m not what you think,” she repeats, and there are tears in her eyes, and Derek can feel her heartbeat racing in her chest. 

“Lydia,” Stiles says, and he drops the bat and makes another move towards her, but Derek stops him again. Stiles turns back to him and gives him a furious look. “Let me go, Derek.”

“This isn’t right,” Derek breathes. The air is still around them, and nothing’s moving, nothing’s making sound, but Lydia looks and feels just as frightened as Stiles should be, and nothing is making any sense. “We need to go, Stiles.”

“You should listen to your friend,” a voice says from out of the darkness. It’s rough and old and Derek recognizes the scent immediately, pipe tobacco and wood. 

There’s this sound like an arrow flying through the air, a sharp whistle, and then the smell of blood blooming. Stiles goes limp beside him. 

***

Derek doesn’t run. 

He drags Stiles behind the wide trunk of the tree Stiles had fallen beside, and then grabs Lydia and tells her to keep an eye on him, the thick spread of blood on his stomach. Stiles watches him leave and he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t ask him to stay, and Derek thanks whatever god is watching over them because he’s not sure what he would do if Stiles had. 

Lydia gathers Stiles to her and presses her hands flat against him, breaking the arrow off right above the wound, but leaving the splinter of wood inside, to stop the blood flow. She looks scared, if determined, and Derek nods once at her, some sort of sign of acceptance or encouragement, before he leaves. 

He tracks the man’s scent and voice and he circles around him, watches as the man reloads another arrow into his crossbow, a weapon that was clearly not designed for his wrinkled hands. He ducks behind a tree and Derek moves back into the shadows. 

“I’m sure you’re curious now,” the man says, his breath labored as he hoists the crossbow up again to take another shot. “Wondering how I found you?”

“Not really,” Derek says, and an arrow flies in his direction, but misses him by about ten feet. “You brought Lydia out here, knowing that I would track her from the hospital.” 

“So you are paying attention,” the man says, and Derek watches him move to another tree, reload another arrow. “To be honest, Derek, I never thought you were that bright.”

Derek walks toward his voice, making sure not to rustle any branches or leaves, to not make a sound. “You killed those people and made it look like animal attacks to the humans, werewolf attacks to the hunters.” Derek dodges another arrow and moves back behind an old oak. “You were going to frame me, right?”

“Now you’re just showing off,” the man says, his voice gruff in the dark, and Derek growls once, the smell of Stiles’ blood still surrounding him. 

“Where’s Scott?”

The man laughs and Derek follows the sound. 

“Never would have taken you for someone who cares, Derek,” the man says. “I mean, with all of those hunters you killed in New York. And, don’t forget you left quite a big mess in that bathroom when you killed my daughter.” 

Derek swallows hard, and the first thought that runs through his mind is Stiles, propped up against a tree, slowly bleeding to death from the arrow in his stomach, and hearing about everything Derek has done. He growls again and he can hear the man make a frustrated, angry sound from somewhere in the darkness. 

“You eviscerated her,” he yells, and there’s a spark as an arrow hits a tree near Derek and explodes. 

Fuck. 

“She killed my whole family,” Derek says, and even he’s amazed at how calm he sounds. He can hear the small, shallow gulps of breath that Stiles is taking, and the frightened whispers from Lydia, asking him to just hold on. He’s got to do something, and he’s got to do it now. He breathes in deeply and says, his voice flippant at best, “Plus, she was kind of a cunt.”

He hears a roar from somewhere in the trees, and there’s a big flash of light, and Derek takes that opportunity to leap out in full wolf form, his claws and teeth and his bright, ice blue eyes, and he comes down on the man, and he’s tearing and biting and somewhere in the distance there’s a scream and all he can smell is blood, metallic tasting in his mouth, and he’s growling and snarling and the man beneath him is fighting back, scratching at his face and arms, trying to speak through his clawed open throat, but then he just gives up, he can’t fight anymore, and there’s no sound, and then it’s only blood and skin and bone and Derek.

***

He drives Lydia and Stiles to the hospital, breaking as many laws as possible on the way there. 

He drops Stiles off in front of the doors, but tells Lydia to take him inside, her thin hospital gown barely covering her body. He presses a quick, clean kiss to Stiles’ mouth and Stiles presses back, weakly, and he can feel the emotions stirring inside of both of them, can feel Stiles’ slow heartbeat, and he wants to stay and he doesn’t want to let go, but he won’t, he can’t. 

Stiles reaches out to take his hand, but Derek steps back.

And then he’s gone. 

***

He goes back to the house to shower, scrubbing as hard as he can to get the blood off of his hands and arms and face and mouth. Part of it belongs to Stiles, part of it to him, but most of it is from Kate’s father, old and tired and losing a war he should have never begun. 

He leans against the cubicle for a minute, lets the water run down his back, and he thinks of Stiles and he thinks of the arrow inside of him and he thinks about losing him and he doesn’t know what he’ll do if everything doesn’t turn out alright. 

He gets dressed again and unburies the weapons he’s stashed in one of his father’s old foot lockers, the guns and knives that were hidden just in case, and he carries them downstairs to the living room, where he lays them out on the mattress one by one. They look foreboding, but Derek figures that he’s probably better off safe than sorry. 

He straps a few knives to his body, tucking one into his boot and another along his belt, and then he starts loading one of the guns, his fingers dry and trembling. 

And then he starts looking for Scott. 

***

Funnily enough, he doesn’t have to go very far. 

***

Scott turns up on one of the old sectioned off dirt roads down near Derek’s house, naked and frightened and shivering, wet with mud and leaves and dirt, unmistakably bitten. 

And not alone. 

***

“I knew it was you,” Derek says, and holds out a knife between them and it looks small and stupid. “I followed the scent to the hospital and you were my first thought.” 

“You always did have good instincts, Derek,” Peter says, and he grips Scott by the back of the neck and Scott is biting his lip, his arms wrapped tight around himself. “Of course, I can take some of the credit.”

Derek growls and Scott jumps. 

“Now, now,” Peter says, clucking his tongue. He’s not wearing his hospital gown anymore, dressed in some of his old, more loose-fitting clothes, and the scars on his face are starting to fade, starting to heal. “You’re frightening him.”

“Let him go,” Derek says, and his grip on the knife is getting tighter, and his knuckles are turning white from the strain. 

“I thought you didn’t want this one,” Peter says, and gives Scott a little shake. “I mean, you’ve clearly marked the other one as yours, so I thought he’d be free game.”

Derek swallows visibly at the thought of Stiles, and Peter smiles at the flinch. 

“How?” Derek asks, and then shakes his head. Maybe he doesn’t want to know. 

Peter shrugs. “It was time, I guess. You know my mind still worked the whole time I was in that bed, right? And, really, it only takes a spark.”

Derek frowns, confused, and Peter rolls his eyes. 

“Don’t tell me you didn’t notice that young girl? The one Gerard used as bait?” Lydia. “She has an amazing mind, you know.”

Scott is looking from Derek to Peter and then back to Derek again, and Derek can feel the blood roar through his veins, can feel his heart racing inside of his chest.

“She wasn’t brain-dead, either. And she just kind of woke me up, I guess.” Peter grins, and it’s not nice. “She’s very enticing once you get to know her.”

“I don’t want to kill you, Peter,” Derek says, and the knife in his hand wavers a little. “But you need to leave Scott and Lydia out of this. You need to leave now.” 

“Oh, come off of your moral superiority kick, Derek,” Peter growls, and suddenly he’s angry, his claws digging into the back of Scott’s neck, Scott’s little yelp high-pitched and scared in the air around them. “I know about all of those hunters, and while I applaud your efforts, it doesn’t make it any better than what I’m doing. Actually, you could say it’s worse, considering the offers on the table.” 

“You didn’t offer the bite to Scott,” Derek growls back. “You forced it on him.”

Peter sighs, more calm. “Semantics,” he shrugs. 

“I don’t want to kill you,” Derek says again, moving closer to Peter and Scott. “But if you don’t leave, I might not have a choice.”

Peter gives him a look then, a look somewhere between disappointment and sorrow, and he breathes, “You will always have a choice, Derek. You’re just choosing these children over what’s left of your family. Don’t forget that.”

And then he drops Scott on the ground and runs. 

***

Derek doesn’t follow.

***

He sneaks into the hospital after visiting hours are over, if only because Stiles’ father had been standing beside his bed all day, watching over him with his gruff, worried demeanor, even after Stiles had told him to leave because all of the nurses were afraid he might pull a gun on them. He walks past the nurse’s station and slips quietly into Stiles’ room and it’s dark and cold and Stiles looks pale on the bed in front of him, ghostly, with his eyes closed and a big bandage wrapped around his middle. 

There’s an unexpected hitch in Derek’s breath and he balls his hands into fists at his side and suddenly he’s angry and afraid and something else he can’t quite name, but then he hears Stiles breathe out in exasperation. 

“Get over here,” he says, and Derek does. 

Stiles takes Derek’s hand and pulls him down and then they’re both on the bed, Derek with half of his body hanging off and Stiles scrunched up against the wall, and Stiles breathes out a laugh, but then presses his hand to his stomach as the pain shoots through him. Derek brushes his nose against Stiles’ chin and tucks his mouth into the space between Stiles’ neck and shoulder, and Stiles lets him. 

“I’m sorry,” Derek mutters into Stiles’ skin, and it’s for Gerard and the arrow, and it’s for all the hunters he’s put into the ground, and it’s for everything. 

Stiles smiles weakly and then lifts himself up to kiss him, and it’s slow and smooth and Derek can’t get enough so he presses harder, deeper, and Stiles brings up his hands to cup Derek’s face, and there are scratches there from the branches and tree bark and the wild scrabble to get to the hospital, and Derek wants nothing more than to gather him up and never let him go. Stiles slides away from the kiss and Derek lets him, nipping softly at Stiles’ bottom lip before moving away. 

“I know,” Stiles says, and he nods slightly, and Derek kisses him again, but briefly this time. 

Derek hums low in his throat and shifts, so he doesn’t fall off the bed, and Stiles takes his hand in his own and presses his mouth to Derek’s palm. “So,” he says, his tone light. “Where do we go from here?”

And Derek smiles.


End file.
